Studies in the Novel articles from June 1995

Studies in the Novel archives from June 1995

Tom Sawyer's games of death.
June 22, 1995... The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is constructed on a loose framework whose major elements include games of death and games of resurrection. (Both meanings of resurrection apply here: resurrection as grave robbing and resurrection as return to life...

The treasure-house of language: managing symbolic economies in Joyce's 'Portrait.'
June 22, 1995... "The regulation of the purse is, in its essence, regulation of the imagination and the heart."(1) James Joyce eventually evolved a complicated, even paradoxical attitude towards money: he alternately played the roles of miser and spendthrift,...

Recent fictions in theory: a reading of Jay Clayton's 'Pleasures of Babel.'
June 22, 1995... A few years ago, in a fit of ethical pique, I swore to myself that I would stop writing negative reviews. I suspected that such reviews brought out the worst in me and my profession, however clever, smart, or even accurate they were. Personally,...

Pleasures of Babel.
June 22, 1995... A few years ago, in a fit of ethical pique, I swore to myself that I would stop writing negative reviews. I suspected that such reviews brought out the worst in me and my profession, however clever, smart, or even accurate they were. Personally,...

Oklahoma Project for Discourse and Theory, vol. 15, Sexuality in Victorian Fiction.
June 22, 1995... Despite its unfortunate title, Allen's book more than lives up to both the reader's expectations and the generally fine quality of this series. Working from a Foucauldian framework informed by psychoanalytic theory, Allen asserts that the...

Seductive Forms: Women's Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740.
June 22, 1995... Along with Daniel Defoe, the most widely read novelists of the period 1680 to 1740 were Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, and Eliza Haywood. Like Defoe, the women novelists were slighted, vilified, or damned with faint praise in their own time. But...

Oliver Twist: Whole Heart and Soul.
June 22, 1995... Re-reading Oliver Twist, one does not expect surprises, for Dickens's novel has become embedded in the consciousness of the public, whether readers, moviegoers, or devotees of musicals. Even so, today's reader is in for a mild shock of...

Crime and Defoe: A New Kind of Writing.
June 22, 1995... One of the surest ways to disrupt a conversation about literature is to ask, "But what makes this book literary?" Though "literature" in the abstract is deceptively easy to discuss, it is much more difficult to parse the adjective "literary," or...

British Fiction in the 1930s: The Dispiriting Decade.
June 22, 1995... In one of his last lectures (transcribed in The Politics of Modernism [New York: Routledge, 1989]), Raymond Williams implored literary scholars to search out "the neglected works left in the wide margin of the [twentieth] century" (p. 35), a task...

Ulysses and the Irish God.
June 22, 1995... As a young man, James Joyce decided that the Roman Catholic Church was responsible for the spiritual paralysis that afflicted his compatriots and resolved to have as little to do with it as possible. Often this entailed offending the...

Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism.
June 22, 1995... Jerome McGann's acclaimed A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism has recuperated textual and bibliographic scholarship from the margins of accepted critical work and identified him as one of the most distinguished practitioners in the field. In...

Coming to Grips with 'Huckleberry Finn': Essays on a Book, a Boy, and a Man.
June 22, 1995... What are we to do with a book which has the audacity, unapologetically dismissed as "old fashioned liberal humanism," to declare that the argument over the imputed racism of Samuel Langhorne Clemens is "urgently . . . unimportant"? Is every...

An Inquiry into Narrative Description and Its Uses in Fielding's 'Tom Jones.'
June 22, 1995... Smith's book is a modestly revised version of his dissertation. Smith did not update the dissertation to account for much of the extensive recent scholarship on Fielding. A series of labored reviews of earlier criticism remains but has been...

Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine's Text at the Turn of the Century.
June 22, 1995... Opening Claudia Tate's timely and compelling study is a moving epigraph from W. E. B. Du Bois' The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911): "You haven't learned our language yet. We don't just blurt into the Negro Problem; that's voted bad form. We...

Thackeray and Slavery.
June 22, 1995... Thackeray and Slavery fills a large gap in Thackeray studies and suggests the value in historicizing this novelist. As his abundant topical reference in novels such as Vanity Fair and The Newcomes indicates, Thackeray was acutely aware of and...

Nobody's Home: Speech, Self, and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo.
June 22, 1995... Arnold Weinstein's endeavor in this book is to present his theory of freedom through language as essential in the formation of a self and a stable identity. This theory is asserted contrary to current historicism, which places the self in a...

Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale.
June 22, 1995... Two very different books, each illustrating trends in Mark Twain scholarship, issued from the Oxford University Press within a few months of each other in 1993. Henry B. Wonham's Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale does for that folk-element...

Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices.
June 22, 1995... Two very different books, each illustrating trends in Mark Twain scholarship, issued from the Oxford University Press within a few months of each other in 1993. Henry B. Wonham's Mark Twain and the Art of the Tall Tale does for that folk-element...

Family and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: the Public Conscience in the Private Sphere.
June 22, 1995... Zomchick's book, the latest volume in the series Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Thought, offers interpretations of Defoe's Roxana, Richardson's Clarissa, Smollett's Roderick Random, Fielding's Amelia, Goldsmith's...